Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Tour of beauty

I'm delighted to be interviewing acclaimed novelist and award-winning short story writer Tom Vowler today as part of his blog tour to launch the paperback publication of That Dark Remembered Day.

As a special treat to Snow Like Thought visitors, Tom's offering one lucky reader a chance to read his novel for free - read on for details.

Tom, firstly, congratulations, That
Dark Remembered Day is your second novel and is a deeply engrossing and
thought-provoking read.

Wolf

That
Dark Remembered Day is a story
ostensibly about the events surrounding one day, except for that day being a
day within a day for a character called Richard, a soldier who has recently
returned from active combat in the Falklands.

Could you
talk a little about why you chose to set your novel in the ‘80s?

Well, it wasn’t for my love of the era’s music. I suppose I became
fascinated in a war that was the last untelevised one. Certainly there was
coverage of the Falklands, but it was drip-fed and highly censored. The
imbedding of journalists on the frontline didn’t really happen until the first
Gulf War. So I had this vague recollection of a conflict, almost over before it
began, and I wondered if there wasn’t some untold aspect of it. I think it’s
still regarded as an unqualified success, yet Britain came very close to defeat
and casualties on both sides were relatively high, the fighting at times brutal
and close-quarter. For me, though, the startling fact was how more British veterans
of the conflict have committed suicide since their return than died on the
battlefield. I was also keen to explore Argentine experiences or the war.

Hunters

It becomes
apparent that Richard has been seriously affected by events in the Falklands
and his condition is exasperated when his former Sergeant pays a house call on
him.

Tell us about
Richard’s condition. How did you first become interested in PTSD?

Richard is a reluctant soldier, his career hastily chosen, following his
father into the forces. Put simply, he’s not build for army life, his nature
too sensitive, too introvert. This leads to his bullying, which finally
convinces him to get out, to start a new life with his family. But a week
before his release, a small island group in the South Atlantic is invaded.

His experiences, the decisions he has to make over the coming months,
leave him deeply scarred, although one of the features of post-traumatic stress
can be its insidious onset, its manifestation rising months or even years later
and with little obvious sign. Past traumatic events are experienced again with great
clarity, the sufferer often unable to distinguish them from reality. Some of
the novel is structured to recreate this disorientation in the reader, to mimic
symptoms of PTSD.

Townsfolk

I was
thinking about representations of war in novels such as The Yellow Birds and Birdsong,
where combat has far reaching consequences but is essentially framed apart from
civilian life, the two contrasted, and the events are narrated from just one
perspective. Your novel is told from three perspectives, Richard’s being one of
them, and it becomes evident early on that combative and civilian life have
become indistinguishable for him, and his behaviour has devastating
consequences for the locals where he lives, doesn’t it?

This is the heart of the book in many ways, how an event ripples out,
impacting the lives of people who have no connection to it. Every decision we
make, however inconsequential it seems, affects the world in some way, changes
its state, even the observing of an atom changes it. What if a car is careering
out of control, about to pass my house, when my phone rings, keeping me at home
a minute longer? Do I owe the caller my life? What about my neighbour, whose
phone didn’t ring, who stepped out into the road? In the novel there’s a case
to make about a faulty firing mechanism on a gun leading a year later to a
tragedy affecting dozens.

Little Bird

The social
and moral implications of your novel are far reaching and you dedicate That Dark Remembered Day to “victims of
violence, be it arbitrary or state-sponsored”, so I was thinking about novels
as protest, then I got to thinking about other examples of literature where the
state’s actions have been called into question. You reference Peter and the
Wolf, twice, and I wonder if you could talk a little about its narrative
function in your novel?

I’m not sure the novel is best served by overt protest, which tends to
come at the expense of the narrative. But of course characters are political
creatures, as are the events they experience, so in this sense every book is a
social and/or moral commentary. I hope I’m never didactic or preachy, though;
the story must come first, must be all. And yet one’s primordial swamp will
always seep up into the work. Perhaps this is most apparent when Mary considers
joining the women of the anti-nuclear peace camp at Greenham Common, despite
her husband being a former serviceman. Is my book an anti-war novel? I hope so,
but that’s not for me to decide.

In That Dark Remembered Day,
Richard’s daughter, Jenny, buys a copy of Peter and the Wolf, an audio book
with a pair of 45s tucked into its sleeves (something I too owned as a child,
spellbound as I was by the instruments that each represent a character). Of
course there is huge allegorical significance here – the hunting, the violence,
the landscape, the woods – as well as a sign of the redemption and hope to
come.

Duck

Sound is a
trigger for Richard’s condition. I was thinking how well Peter and the Wolf
paralleled the duality of the familiar and unfamiliar for Richard in its use of
instruments to represent characters. But I was also thinking about form, what its implications were in Soviet Russia
in the ‘30s. Peter and the Wolf is a pseudo-fairy-tale, but it doesn’t comply
with that genre’s model: there’s no reward for its hero, for example, and its
villain goes unpunished.There’s another
parallel here. If (humour me) Richard was a character in Peter and the Wolf,
who, for example, would he be: Peter or the Wolf?

A key feature of PTSD is the reliving of sound, in this case Richard’s
war experiences, the flashbacks, nightmares and hallucinations vividly felt. I
certainly mined my own childhood for some of the book, the sound of Prokofiev’s
composition still resonant now when I recall my own father dropping needle onto
vinyl, hearing the instruments introduced, the fear as the wolf was announced. I
was keen not to write a hero into the story, which would seem to detract from
the horror of war. Richard is, of course, both Peter and the wolf. As we all
are.

Peter

Prokofiev
represented the character of Peter with string instruments. Tell me about
Mary’s violin, why does she keep it in the cupboard?

It’s a symbol of her unrealised life, how having been first a wife, then
a mother, an awakening rises in her, to live in a manner of her choosing, to
resist the direction 1980s society was taking. She wants to consume less,
recycle, become more self-sufficient (something that’s trendy now, but hardly
existed then). Even her career as a nurse has involved the care of others, and
in seeing a live performance she recalls her latent musical ambition. Later, as
she considers infidelity, the violin is used as a tool of seduction.

Cat

I want to ask
you about the dog. I thought it interesting, though not unusual for a pet, that
it was anthropomorphised to the extent it was, simply by its being named Shane
(the nearest character to an actual wolf is an Australian bowler!). As with
Richard’s character, the dog has two functions, is both animal and person, wild
and domestic. I kept waiting for the dog to do something significant, but it
seemed just as impotent as the other characters, so I wonder if you could talk
a little bit about power and agency in your novel.

*walks out in a huff at the cricket reference, before returning to the
crease* I’d counter that the dog does nothing significant. It’s chosen at the
animal sanctuary by the family together, but of course the children soon lose
interest, it being an older dog. And so Richard is forced to walk it in the
woods, which becomes his sanctuary, the origin of his obsession with the
peregrines. The dog, sullen when Richard is away training, becomes more morose
with its master’s extended absence for war, Mary struggling to form a bond with
it. But the change comes during Richard’s decent into his traumatic state,
whereupon the dog’s nature also shifts subtly, snarling at Mary for the first
time, despite her being the hand that feeds it. In the end the dog is the only
one Richard is capable of being around, its undemanding company, its lack of
judgment towards him all he can deal with. There’s a nod here to a favourite
novel, Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome,
which has at its heart a relationship between a man and his dog.

Parade

In
Prokofiev’s symphony, all the parts are narrated, with exception of the final
parade that is left to the listener to decode from the musical key they have
been provided with throughout the previous movements. As already mentioned,
Prokofiev’s tale doesn’t fulfil the conventions of its genre. There is no
death. Could you narrate us out?

That Dark
Remembered Day has its own quiet parade, Richard’s possible sighting
of bird his father never saw. Endings are notoriously difficult to get right
and of course I’m not the one to judge whether or not I have. I think this book
got under my skin more than others; certainly your penetrative questions have
teased out much of the emotion I felt during its research and composition. But
that’s it now. My journey with it ends. It’s for others to make of it what they
will.

Click on cover to buy.

Tom Vowler is a novelist and short story
writer living in south west England. His debut collection, The Method, won the Scott Prize in 2010 and his novel What Lies Within received critical
acclaim. He is co-editor of the literary journal Short Fiction and an associate lecturer in creative writing at
Plymouth University, where he’s completing a PhD. That Dark Remembered Day is his second novel. More at www.tomvowler.co.uk

Thank you for
stopping by, Tom. That Dark Remembered Day is a beautiful and lyrical novel, despite the tragedy at its core, and I wish you the very best with it and for the rest of your blog tour:

7 comments:

The worst thing that happened to me in the Falklands War is that someone spat in my face because I was opposed to it. (The depth of irrational feeling that going to war stirs in the civilian population is astonishing).

I have a vivid, "photographic" memory of that minor assault. It must be infinitely worse for those whose memories are of hot metal and cold steel.

A colleague of mine at the time had been in the navy. He told me how the exocet attacks on the ships haunted his imagination. He said the public saw the news photographs while all he could see in his mind's eye was burning aluminium and mangled, burning, screaming teenagers.

I could go on about the Belgrano, but this is supposed to be a comment, not a post...

Wow, this really sounds incredible. In the same genre of Tim O'Brien's The Things We Carried as well as Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front. Amazing how no matter where or when a war happens, they're all the same.